“Help! I’m Terrible At Setting Boundaries”
It might be your children, your partner, your mother, your boss. Chances are there is someone in your life who regularly oversteps your boundaries and you’d like them to stop. It may perhaps make you feel better to know that you are not the only one navigating the issue.
“Women in particular struggle with boundaries,” says clinical psychologist Dr Rebecca Ray. “Many of us grew up in family units where mothers either met everyone else’s needs before they met their own, or where fathers’ needs were considered as being most important. We have been culturally conditioned to be good girls, to want to avoid causing someone else pain.”
Her new book, Setting Boundaries, is a guide to identifying where your personal boundaries lie and how to protect them. It offers a range of tools to help set and maintain boundaries, including how to deal with the difficult conversations that can arise as a result. We asked Ray for her best advice for anyone who wants to get better at maintaining boundaries.
1. Understand that breaking a pattern is difficult
If you have issues with boundaries, then getting used to establishing them will be a challenge. “When you first start setting boundaries, it can bring up complex feelings,” Ray says. “If you like making other people happy, you may have to deal with a lot of fear, with guilt, with anxiety. It can feel easier to just stay in the pattern rather than turning your own life upside down.”
Pushback from other people can intensify those feelings. “The people in your life who profit from your boundaries being absent or weak, they are going to want the situation to continue. They are benefiting from it – they’re not going to step back their own expectations.”
2. Learn to accept discomfort
The reason many of us struggle with change is because it feels uncomfortable – but Ray points out that discomfort can be a sign of growth. “Any time you are put outside your comfort zone, you feel discomfort, but that’s how we grow,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you have to like the sensation of discomfort, but you do need to allow it the space to be present.”
Her book contains a range of psychological strategies designed to help you deal with discomfort, or as Ray describes it, a toolbox for self-regulation. She identifies the common emotions that can arise – from frustration and guilt to uncertainty, unworthiness and rejection – and the tools you can use to work through them.
The end goal, she says, is not necessarily to make the uncomfortable feelings go away. “It’s about changing how you relate to the feeling, rather than changing the feeling itself.”
3. Be realistic about outcomes
“When I started working on this book, I asked the community online what they wanted to know about setting boundaries,” she says. “I was flooded with comments and the most common one by far was about how to set boundaries without upsetting someone – which is not always possible.
“Sometimes there are consequences to setting boundaries. The person who is most invested in you not having boundaries will be the one to protest the loudest, and it’s important to understand that. Boundaries are actually a gift in relationships – they are what keeps a relationship healthy. We have to acknowledge that we can’t control other people and how they react to our boundaries; all we can control is where we set our boundaries.”
Setting Boundaries by Dr Rebecca Ray is out now.
Interview_Ute Junker
Photos_ Supplied